Breaking Away

As an undergraduate, when I reached Circe I stopped reading.-- my intrepid Ulysses group facilitator, Lance.

I have also entertained the possibility of returning to Ridley Park. The borough was my last suburban territory before I ran, so unsuccessfully, from the block where I listened to Townsend's album so often mio padre stormed out of his bedroom and abused my stereo, smashing it, while I was reading a community college instructor's critique of one of my grandiose hand written stories. "I have no one to help me pack," I interrupted my neighbor Ed last week, and it is petty obstacles like this with which I am making myself ill. Ed is mildly befuddled by my need, my sheer urgency, to get the holy motherfucking hell away from this company, from African American stoic indolence.

It does not surprise me that Joyce had a daughter with schizophrenia. Ulysses is in many ways symptomatic of the illness, just as the novel itself foreshadows the ailments of the Lost Generation. Zelda was the flowering wound that made Scott the voice of the Jazz Age, and nearly all of Fitzgerald's output speaks to me as much through my Aunt Cecily as through my own creative intuition. Cecily was in the twenties as much as her sister Pauline was in the cloister. Telling you that I hate Joyce bothers me less than the fact that my preferences have passion, but I disservice myself by emoting it that simply, since there is much in Joyce with which I identify.

I told Lance not to read my account on Blogger, despite handing him my Amazon download page, lamely, but should he surf by, I am four and a half chapters behind, in Sirens, so it seems evident that spastic has had her fill of literary class instruction, ne c'est pas? Lance is the talent of the next generation, a kind, decent young man who yields to the humorous impulse. I am not in equal measure a decent and dignified old woman: we always continue learning, but with deceleration of a half century and the twilight of my ambition ahead, no more school, however lax the simulation. 

This posits the urgency. I cannot make Ed see it, that without a relocation, my moral compass will collapse. I need to make this happen this season, and if the drama of my sanity hinges on my failure or success, you'll no doubt read to tell the tale.